STAYING ALIVE: DOCUMENTING THE UGANDA CANCER INSTITUTE (2012)

Photographs played a major role in the nineteen sixties in the formation of the Uganda Cancer Institute in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. The Irish surgeon Denis Parsons Burkitt lost his right eye during an accident at the age of eleven, but compensated for this loss with his camera. He travelled across Africa to photograph children with swelling in their jaws, stomachs and legs, convinced that this was one and the same disease.

By charting the distribution area of the disease he was able to establish a connection with the pattern of malaria, which is spread by mosquitos. In 1964, it was officially named Burkitt lymphoma. The Lymphoma Treatment Center is one of the two in patient treatment facilities of the Uganda Cancer Institute that was subsequently founded in Kampala in 1967. As part of a larger project Andrea Stultiens invited John Nyende and Coleb Butungi, both medical illustrators, to make drawings of the photographs commissioned by oncologists in the late nineteen sixties of patients. The selection here shows only patients with Burkitt’s lymphoma. The translation from photograph to drawing maintains the privacy of those portrayed. It also makes it less traumatising to look at the sometimes shocking effects of the tumors on the body and takes away taboos of gender and nudity that would, specially in Uganda, make it impossible to show these photographs in public.